Superbrothers + Jim Guthrie X Sound Shapes

A message from a representative at Superbrothers, written in the midst of a spring thunderstorm in the hill country at the Quebec/Vermont border.

It is with immense pleasure that we are announcing our involvement with a videogame project known as Sound Shapes. We are extra excited to be contributing alongside sworcery maestro Jim Guthrie. This represents the latest in a series of Superbrothers X Jim Guthrie a/v collaborations dating back to 2005′s musical film Children of the Clone and 2008′s Dot Matrix Revolution, but this will be our first a/v collaboration since 2011′s cult classic videogame Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

Much like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Sound Shapes is a made-in-Toronto DIY videogame, it’s unusually collaborative and it has a heavy emphasis on synesthetic audiovisual style. What’s more, the people making Sound Shapes are all basically our very best pals – they’re the folks with whom we play board games, drink the beers, go skating and play hockey. On every level it’s an honor and a thrill to be involved.

The Superbrothers + Jim Guthrie collaboration will take the form of a Sound Shapes ‘album’ – a series of thematically connected & musically-linked levels known as CORPOREAL.

Sound Shapes is coming to PS Vita, and it’ll be available before too long. Get psyched!!!

The Collaborative Process

After some initial discussion with Queasy Games we chose to explore some of the concepts in prior Superbrothers films including Children of the Clone and Dot Matrix Revolution, so Torontronic is populated by computers, mainframes, office workers and water coolers. My mom was one of the first female computer programmers in Canada and my father worked as a mainframe computer salesman for decades, so it was nice to set aside the skeletons and space babies for once. Meanwhile, the videogame design takes the friendly platforming mechanics of Sound Shapes and stretches them in the direction of Impossible Mission-style puzzling.

The last time Superbrothers and Jim Guthrie collaborated on a videogame with sworcery, the staff at Superbrothers was responsible for the core concepts, sound design concepts, game design, as well as all of the art, animation and writing. Superbrothers brought Jim Guthrie into the project, figuring out the musical tone of the project and building on a years-long creative relationship. Capy, the independent videogame studio in Toronto, enabled and co-created the project every step of the way, getting it to the finish line in style.

With this new collaboration the configuration is quite different. In Torontronica – the game design, level design and sound integration are being handled by the Sound Shapes experts at Queasy. The order of operations was a little different this time around too. On S:S&S EP, many of the songs predated the project and I was able to create the world and concepts by listening to specific songs, many of them pre-existing compositions from Jim. In this case, the art assets were created without a specific soundtrack, and then it was up to Jim to craft his sounds to fit the look and concept.

Of course, the real work took place at Queasy & Capy, where a wide-ranging assortment of designers & creators – the Sound Shapes experts – put all the pieces together. Thanks so much for all your hard work folks, it has been a pleasure contributing to your efforts!

If you’re going to be at E3, feel free to stop by the Sony booth for some hands-on time!

Comments

i was kinda really hoping this would be out now. was kinda my dark horse for being the best of the launch titles for vita and all i see is it being pushed back and thing being added to it. Also how come the beta wasn’t made more freely available as it seems it went out to the GAP member which sucked seen as GAP ended years ago.

Anyway looking forward to the game if and when it finally get’s a new launch date with no further delays.

I’m so excited for this game.. its seems to becoming something really special, rater than something just really cool. S&S:EP was a fantastic title, made even better by artstyle and music, and this is by the guy behind Everyday Shooter which I still love (plus the PSP version looks great on Vita)..
In closing: I am excite.

Sounds and looks very cool and different, which is always a positive!
Would love to hear the price and eta but will probably defo pick this title up!

@ Alonemusic

I have EveryDay Shooter on the PS3 and loved it (wish it’d had a trophy patch though but still a cool game), I’m on the fence on if I should buy the PSP version for my Vita as it’s about £6.50, how does the handheld version rate?

hmm.. Well, it is just the PSP version which is exactly the same as the PS3 version. I couldn’t recommend it on PSP as everything is so tiny you will just die all the time. Being able to map controls to Vita and the big screen fixes this to some extent, but it is the same game you already have.
I like the PS3 version, but I play it more on Vita as its a bit more of a pick up and play for a couple of minutes kinda game. (plus I’m a real sucker for these kinda games, and I loved the ps3 one so much I felt like giving them more money…)
£6.50 does seem a little steep, i thought it was about £3.. but maybe I got it on sale…
Not a very conclusive post really!